Starting Cadoo
It started with a Snapchat group. “🏃♂️💸Running💸🏃♂️” Was created back in high school after me and my friends committed to running 5 miles a week.
I always had friends who were great runners, I was never the athletic one. Running was something I wanted to get good at, and my friends knew I wanted to work towards it as well.
To give myself a kick in the pants, I made this group chat with my running friends to see if it could help me be more consistent. It’s crazy what $5 can do.
Our plan was to run together, record our runs with strava, and send screenshots. If you didn’t do your runs by Friday, you had to pay the other 4 in the group $5 each.
I think it took us 5 weeks before we had someone fail the challenge. In that 5 week stretch I took my mile time from 7:00 down to 5:45. The incentive motivated me to reach my goal, a PR, and it helped me achieve something I never thought I could, I became a runner.
That incentive was powerful, if it can work for running, it can work for cycling, weightlifting, even learning a language. I knew it was something I wanted to share with the world.
Throughout high school I was always interested in tech. Getting lots of unique opportunities, such as an internship for Diginex in Hong Kong, which also helped me work closely with Tim Parsa on AirTM.
While at AirTM with Tim, I got to learn about all his other side projects and ideas, one of them being Cadoo, at the time a web-app for sending gift cards with money attached. Tim’s vision for Cadoo was very similar to what I experienced with my running group chat. Creating a platform that uses financial incentives to help people reach their goals.
After working on AirTM together, sharing my experiences with what I did in High School, and pitching him a new plan for Cadoo. We decided to work together on making this platform a reality, with me as the CEO.
We decided to “Niche Down” Cadoo, and focus on building an app that incentivizes fitness and education. Two tasks that help people grow.
Cadoo needed to have a “DuoLingo” like experience, sending notifications instantly, unlocking exclusive perks for reaching goals, and more. Ultimately combining social accountability with gamification, and financial incentives.
Being a self-taught designer, I started to work on designs in June of 2019. I brought on Mert Akman, an internet friend and competent back end developer to help build out an MVP.
When the time was right, we brought on Mirkan Caliskan turn my designs into dart code. And almost a year later, in February 2020, we launched Cadoo.
It was a slow start, at the time, we had one integration, Fitbit, no group challenges, and a very small initial user base to reach out to. With Cadoo challenges being individual challenges at the time, getting users to pay was hard, we knew something needed to change.
Our snapchat group chat was a group chat. It was social. Launching Cadoo helped me realize, the financial incentive helped create a community of people working hard to reach the same goal. And this was what made me run, it wasn’t about getting paid, or loosing money.
We went back to the drawing board and started redesigning the app. Making Cadoo challenges group challenges, where we pair people up from all over the world to reach the same goal. Winners get their money back, loosers have their money evenly distributed to winners.
While doing research and looking for customers, I came across, FitDuel, which closed down in 2018. An app very similar to what we are making at Cadoo. After reaching out to the founder, Tyler Davis, he gave me really helpful advice on what to look out for, and what will help make Cadoo successful. I could tell he was still very passionate about this idea.
In March, we decided to bring Tyler on to help us out with Growth. Since re-launching Cadoo for Group Challenges, we started to acquire our first real customers, gain a following of dedicated users who love us, and start to grow.
Currently, you can join Cadoo challenges for Fitbit and Strava, we have a community of about 1,000 users (everyone from moms looking to loose weight to Olympic trial athletes), and have helped people run an outstanding 25,000 miles. That’s one trip around the world for Cadoo!
It is my mission to turn Cadoo into an app that helps millions of people reach their goals. We will be an app integrated with many different fitness, education, and wellness platforms. Built for the most competitive people to someone looking to go an extra mile in their runs. If you have a goal you want to reach, there will be a Cadoo challenge for you!
You can check us out at the app store or play store. If you run, come join a challenge! I will see you on Cadoo. 😉
It is great to hear that you went out to even find out shut-down products and their products in your domain and brought on their founder for guidance. Best to learn from others’ mistakes.